<...>
>
> This absurd myth comes courtesy of Marshall Sahlins.
>
> Who was doing the time and motion study on these prehistoric hunter
> gatherers, one wonders? And since when did people who lived in such
> societies have even a concept of free time. The whole methodology is
> just childish fantasy dressed up as mock profundity. It is what Brecht
i'll go out on a limb and say you clearly haven't read _stone age economics_. he deals with the methodology in great detail (pointing out, for example, that the quantitative studies his thesis is based on involve groups that were pushed from verdant to desolate areas by colonial expansion); and his argument is *not* that they 'had more free time' but, rather, that there is no basis for the claim that technical and economic advances have brought about any quantitative benefits in terms of the time a society devotes to feeding and equipping itself.
> parodied as the imaginary land of Cockayne, where ready-roasted chickens
> fly into your mouth. That 'free time' was just idle hunger and anxiety.
iirc, he quotes this by way of supporting a main argument of the book: to wit, that modern assumptions about 'premodern' peoples speak *only* of modern anxieties.
i'll be polite: he's a bit more reflexive than you are. not exactly a herculean feat, imo.
cheers, t - lemme see, here... <rummage rummage> ah--a .sig:
Having equipped the hunter with bourgeois impulses and paleolithic tools, we judge his situation hopeless in advance. --marshall sahlins